#Overeating #FoodPreferences #HumanBehavior
Do you ever find yourself reaching for that extra slice of cake even though you’re already full? 🍰 Or perhaps indulging in a second helping of your favorite comfort food 🍕 even when you know you’ve had enough? It’s a common behavior among humans to overeat or overindulge, and there are several reasons behind this preference.
Evolutionary Perspective
From an evolutionary standpoint, our ancestors faced periods of food scarcity. In order to survive and pass on their genes, they needed to consume as many calories as possible when food was available. This survival instinct has been ingrained in us over generations, leading to a preference for overeating when food is plentiful.
Emotional Eating
Emotions can also play a significant role in our food choices. Stress, boredom, happiness, and sadness can all trigger the desire to overeat as a way to cope with or enhance our emotions. 🤔
Food Reward System
Certain foods, particularly those high in sugar, fat, and salt, trigger our brain’s reward system, leading to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. This can create a cycle of overindulgence as we seek out these pleasurable sensations.
Psychological Factors
Psychological factors such as societal norms, peer pressure, and advertising can also influence our eating behaviors. For example, social gatherings often revolve around food, leading us to consume more than we need in order to fit in or feel included. 🥂
Healthy Eating Habits
Despite these natural tendencies, it’s important to listen to our bodies and practice mindful eating. Paying attention to hunger cues, eating slowly, and choosing nutrient-dense foods can help us maintain a healthy balance and avoid overindulging. 🍎
In conclusion, while humans may have a preference to overeat or overindulge, understanding the reasons behind this behavior can help us make more mindful choices and maintain a healthy lifestyle. By being aware of our evolutionary instincts, emotional triggers, food rewards, and societal influences, we can cultivate a balanced relationship with food and prioritize our health and well-being. 🌟
So, next time you’re tempted to reach for that extra portion or snack, take a moment to pause and ask yourself if you’re truly hungry or just satisfying a craving. Remember, it’s okay to indulge occasionally, but moderation is key when it comes to nourishing our bodies and sustaining our health. 💪🏼 #HealthyChoices #MindfulEating #Balance
For the vast majority of human history (history of all life, really) food was scarce and you spent most of your time just trying to get enough to eat. When you were lucky enough to have _too much_ food, overeating let you pack on the fat that would keep you alive when food _wasn’t_ plentiful. Folks that didn’t overeat during the good times starved to death in the lean times.
It has only been the last 100 years or so that food insecurity has ceased to be a prevalent issue in the Western world. You and I aren’t worried about not having food to eat tomorrow. The problem is that the instincts that kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years are still there, so we are hard wired to overeat even though we _know_ there is no reason to.
Humans evolved to live in a pre-agricultural world. They live in a very different one, where food is industrially developed and processed. Behaviors, like eat every berry you come across, made sense before, but not today.
Biologically, it’s not in your best interest to only take what you need to “break even” with what you spend. Currently, most of us (in the wealthier side of the world) are in a constant state of plenty, where eating until we are satisfied is both the ideal scenario, and the one we have access to pretty much at all times. For this group, going days without food or skipping meals is a choice, not a requirement to endure.
Your body is evolved around the idea of not having times of plenty every single day, however. The days you overeat or take advantage of a resource today, help make up for days (tomorrow, the day ofter, or so on) where you can’t take in everything you spent. Our bodies store energy by necessity, rewards high-energy food sources to make sure we are encouraged to seek low-cost rewards to maximize our chances (less energy spent seeking food is better), and so on.
It’s made all the worse because we have access to all of these in abundance, and they make food all the more enticing, and hard to cut back on. Ironically, over-indulgence is a new danger to our health when you are wealthy enough to afford choosing your meals every day multiple times a day.
Because almost everywhere and for almost all of history, “Enough to eat today” has been no guarantee of “Enough to eat tomorrow”. So the people who survived – our ancestors – were the ones with a tendency to eat what they could, while they could.
No animal is satisfied just eating an amount that they need to sustain life. It would mean that they’d have no excess stores and would begin starving as soon as food was unavailable. Every animal has evolved to eat a lot when food is available in order to account for the times when food is unavailable.
Today’s food in the developed world is often full of sugars, fats, and salt and tastes damn good! We eat it for pleasure more than sustenance and, like anything that gives us pleasure, overindulge and addiction can become a problem.
When our ancestors were living in the trees, those that gorged themselves when food was available were more likely to survive when food was not available, and these survivors would go on to have more babies, and those babies would be more likely to inherit whatever it was about their parents that made them want to gorge themselves when food was available.
We have not significantly evolved as a species since that time, despite civilization rapidly changing and for many people eliminating food scarcity.
Because “an unhealthy amount of calories even being an option” just wasn’t a thing for like 99.9999% of evolutionary history. Food was scarce and unpredictable for thousands of generations of our ancestors, and there was always the threat of drought, injuries, sickness, etc. so **”eat all the calories you can find” was the optimal strategy that evolved.** That worked great since it was basically impossible to regularly find and eat enough calories to be a problem.
All of that changed only about 100 years ago, with calories suddenly being easily available all the time. 100 years is a fraction of a blink of an eye compared to the speed of evolutionary adaptations. It’s just WAY too recent a change, and so we’re all still running the “eat all the calories you can find” program since that served the last billion years of ancestors really well.
Because we haven’t had time to out-evolve our hunter-gatherer instincts.
We’ve only had what you could call, for want of a better word, civilization, for maybe 6,000 years, agriculture for maybe 12,000 years.
For the other 95-98% of time that humans have existed as humans, we were hunter-gatherers.
When you’re a hunter-gatherer, you don’t have much in the way of stored food, you don’t have a harvest you’re expecting or a granary, or a pen full of sheep you keep for wool, but could slaughter for food if times get lean.
You *don’t know* where your calories are coming from tomorrow, so **you eat whatever you can as much as you can TODAY.** Back then, those impulses served us well. Storing up some extra calories in good times could make the difference between surviving a lean season and succumbing to starvation and disease.
Having a relative overabundance of cheap calories available is an extremely recent phenomenon. Even in “civilized” countries, it’s only become common in the last 50-100 years. Before that, mostly only the wealthy and powerful could afford to become fat.
So… even though you know you have all the calories you need, you’re still attracted to calorie-dense foods, as much as you can get, and it takes a lot of effort for your nice modern forebrain to overcome those impulses.
This is especially true if you grew up poor, in a situation where you *didn’t* necessarily always have enough to eat. It tends to kick those instincts into overdrive, and they stay with you into adulthood.
Because the food we eat is over-processed and engineered to make us crave it. It also has way more nutrients and calories than the food we used to eat.
Combined with lower amounts of physical labour, our bodies hormonal systems get disordered and we lose the ability to regulate our food intake properly.
Contrary to what others are saying, there were many human societies that did not have a lack of food.
For example, prior to WW2, the Netherlands had not had a famine for centuries.
Multiple generations of humans grew up with more than enough food.
The nutritional value was lower, which is why people nowadays are taller and fatter than back then.
Because food tastes so gooooood. If everything was bland and boring I’d just eat enough to stay alive but give me some amazing Indian or Italian or Thai food or a pint of chocolate ice cream and I’m GOING to overindulge.
And of course for most of us junk food is easy to get and inexpensive and high salt and fat (so tastes good) so high calorie low nutrition food is widely available for cheap.
It isn’t just humans if you’ve ever owned a pet you’d know a lot of them will just eat until they can’t move if you let them. Some will just eat till they’re full but lots of cats and dogs I’ve had I had to only feed them certain amounts to maintain their weight else they’d just guts food all day.
The way the vast majority of animals die is through getting eaten or starving with the remainder succumbing to disease (although often the disease just makes them more vulnerable to getting eaten or starving). Food security is not something that exists in the natural world so our brains are wired to indulge as much as possible when we can since the next meal might be a week away. Obesity isn’t really something that exists in nature.
The problem is we have utterly broken the calories in – calories out equation. We’re definitely more sedentary which doesn’t help, but being able to easily eat 5000 calories every day with no more effort than going to the store means the “calories in” portion has skyrocketed. There’s a big difference between eating a bunch of fruit/nuts/meat every few weeks while roaming the Savannah vs eating a package of Oreos everyday for a year while sitting at your computer. Even until relatively recently, famine was still a regular occurrence for societies which had time appropriate mastery of agriculture.
All animals take as much as possible when available. Humans, dogs, cats etc. And if they aren’t just consuming as much as possible, they are storing as much as possible (squirrels etc). Because there was a time when food wasn’t available all the time
I agree with all of these scientific answers, but I’ll also add a personal anecdote.
I’ve been overweight my entire life. I never knew what “normal” people must feel like until I took Ozempic. With it, I eat a little, feel satisfied, and go about my life. Without it there is a part of my brain that always craves food. Even when I’m full!
It’s not like real hunger. It’s just an underlying feeling of dissatisfaction and unease. And it’s always there. I don’t know why I’m wired that way. But now that I’ve found something that makes me feel normal, it’s such a relief.
Having struggled with over eating & weight since the 2nd grade, I was placed on Ozempic for diabetes at 77. I never knew it was possible just to not care about food. Fifteen months & 55 lbs later, I’m angry about all the guilt & shaming about discipline & self control overweight people face when it is clearly a chemical problem. I think one Ozempic user said it best: “I look at a bag of Doritos and it might as be a sack of socks!”
Human finds thing that make them happy
Getting a little more of that thing makes them a little more happy
So naturally the human brain keeps thinking more of this thing equals more happy
And you get stuck in a hellish cycle
And eventually it gets to the point where you are reliant on that thing to make you happy to the point where it’s difficult to stop overindulging because you just want more and more happiness
Lots of people commenting the ‘humans over eat because they’re surrounded by plenty’.
I don’t agree with this.
Modern day Western humans over eat because their diet is comprised of ultra processed food. Ultra processed food is extensively engineered to hack and bypass our “satiety” systems which should regulate how much we eat. They do this because if you eat more, they get more money.
As other societies have adopted a modern western diet, they have also become obese.
If you want a really great book on the subject read “ultra processed people” by Chris van tulleken. The Audiobook is excellent.
The human body is designed to take advantage of nutrients when they are available as it evolved to endure periods where food might not be consistently available. This is why fatty, sugary, and salty foods are so appealing to the human palate, because naturally those tend to be the most calorie dense foods found in nature. What isnt immediately used as fuel gets stored as fat for later, which is great when starvation is a constant threat.
In the modern day, with the rise of agriculture and global shipping routes humans made it so there are virtually no points in time where food is scarce in developed civilization, however the human body is still adapted to consume as much food as it can whenever available, so the cravings to eat more than necessary are still around even if the risk of starving is practically eradicated in developed civilization.
TLDR: the human body is designed to assume food is inconsistently available so in a time where human civilization has made food practically unlimited all the time the adaptions to avoid starvation are still present resulting in unhealthy weight gain.
Our bodies have systems in place to ensure that when we encounter fat or sugar we eat as much as is available. That’s because we evolved in situations where fat and sugar were scarce and hard to get. Even after the Agricultural Revolution and the through much of the Industrial Revolution, fat and sugar were still ‘a treat’. Then our civilization got really good at farming for fat and sugar. It’s cheap and available everywhere – look at your local 7-11 convenience store – it’s like a temple to fat and sugar. But your body is still adapted for scarcity. Physical evolution is a lot slower than cultural, social or technological evolution.
Lack of nutrition in modern diet > searching nutrition > over eating
Over exercising intensively > hunger > over eating
Dropping calories too low > increased hunger
Tricking the body with sweeteners > insulin release > searching for food to use insulin > over eating
Ultra processed foods > consumed 50% faster over natural whole foods > brain doesn’t register fullness > over eating
Lack of fibre, proteins, healthy fats in foods that are pure or almost full carb > nothing to slow digestion / slow absorption or offer satiation > over eating
We all have a little monkey brain inside of us that is used to having to hunt, forage and compete for food in order to not starve to death. The few thousand years where we’ve had relative abundance doesn’t reprogram hundreds of thousands of years of fearing the daily threat or starvation; we are programmed to eat what we can when we can because tomorrow’s hunt might not work out in our favor.
It’s not just humans that have a tendency to overeat. Fat dogs and cats exist, as well as animals like raccoons. The mechanisms that tell you to stop eating (by sensing how physically full the stomach is, blood sugar levels, timing of when you eat, setpoint weight, etc) haven’t adapted to the very recent trends of modern food (food has a lot of sugar and is more convenient than ever).
Human physiology evolved when food was scarce and where eating as much as possible was evolutionarily favored.
Why do you think overindulgence is limited to just food?
According to multiple sources from health & science websites, it takes on average about 20 to 30 minutes for the human body to signal to the brain that it is full. So, to answer your question, it’s not so much a conscious “preference” that we make to overindulge. It’s simply just that every single person that has ever existed throughout humanity’s history who’s had access to food has “overindulged” for most of their lives, without even realizing it. I personally purposely “overindulge” all the time probably because I smoke a lot of weed, but I truly do love food though. Food is life.
Sources:
https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/What-happens-when-you-overeat.h23Z1592202.html#:~:text=“It%20takes%20about%2020%20minutes,research%20dietitian%20at%20MD%20Anderson.
https://www.webmd.com/obesity/features/slow-down-you-eat-too-fast
https://www.livescience.com/health/food-diet/does-it-really-take-20-minutes-to-realize-youre-full
https://theappetitedoctor.co.uk/2019/02/05/does-it-really-take-20-minutes-for-your-brain-to-know-youre-full/
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-to-tell-when-you-are-full
Not an expert but maybe it’s a mix of body chemistry and conditioning. Chemistry in the sense that many processed foods these days are targeting releasing “feel good” / pleasure in eating them. And conditioning in the sense that we got used to it, it’s easy, you can combine it with other things that you like… jeez that just made me remember that Seinfeld episode where George… okay I’ll leave it there.
That’s a complicated question, but I’d say it’s because of dopamine. Western society isn’t food scarce anymore, and eating provides a lot of happy feel-good chemicals that you typically want more of.